1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a searching method and, more particularly, to a dynamic searching method of provisioning instance identifiers (PRIDs) suitable for data tables of a network policy database.
2. Description of Related Art
Internet is widely accepted and used by various enterprises as information technologies are improved day by day. Accordingly, networking is implemented by increasing networks and communications, so that network configuration and management become more complex. However, human administrators are hard to completely own a variety of required knowledge and skills to manage more and more new devices. To overcome it, a policy-based network management (PBNM) system has been developed to offer administrators in determining specific policies according to required services and management and storing the specific policies in a network policy database. Thus, the system can automatically perform the PBNM system based on rules and conditions of the specific policies determined. For example, dominance of configuration, bandwidth and the like, warranties of network quality of service (QoS), or network security management services like Virtual Private Network (VPN) and so on, such that administrators need not to configure all network equipment one by one.
Typical PBNM is generally applied to Common Open Policy Server protocol usage for policy provisioning (COPS-PR) module and dominates a plurality of tables and corresponding PRIDs by means of table index management mechanism in a form of policy information base (PIB). This is because network management is a relational database management. In such a management, a system cannot know how many data tables may be used by a network policy until the policies are completely inputted by the network administrator. As such, the relation in the relational database is not applicable to associate with the relationship between data tables. Therefore, when network policies are stored in a policy database, PRIDs must be used to associate with data between data tables.
As cited, a plurality of data tables is defined in PIB. Further, each data table defines a plurality of PRIDs to respectively guide to particular storage spaces and indicate total data storage available in the data table. For example, if a number of 255 storage records in total is set to a data table, PRID numbers for the data table are sequentially assigned as 1 to 255. Also, due to a plurality of data tables used by a network policy in general, each data table is searched for available PRID(s) in order to be filled with instruction data associated with actions to be performed by the network policy.
However, available PRIDs are automatically numbered in data tables by increasing logic and thus the PRID number is increased successively. Even though a network administrator deletes and changes original network policy so that some PRIDs become empty in corresponding data tables, the system will search those after the last PRID used, i.e., skipping the middle PRIDs not used before, when adding any new network policy. For example, if the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th PRIDs in a data table have been filled with data, the 7th PRID is next used in the data table in case of an new network policy added, and thus the 4th PRID is automatically skipped. In this case, range tolerance like the cited 255 is easily exceeded in a corresponding data table and this also causes resource waste and makes a limit when storing network policy data.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.